February 21, 2013

Dark Victory (1939) - DVD

by Walter Chaw There's been
almost as much written about the life of Bette Davis as there has about
her work, and I must confess that, with few exceptions, I consider her
life to be far more interesting than her films. The best Davis picture
from start to finish is probably The Letter--and
the most honoured of her superfluity of clunkers is Edmund Goulding's
really quite dreadful Dark Victory, released in the
annus mirabilis of 1939. Fanatics
point to La Davis's performance in this one as her most stirring, but
all I see is a terminal ham pretending to have a brain tumor and
cinematic blindness. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, I
suppose, but then there's the vomitous condescension of the hero
doctor, the woeful miscasting of Humphrey Bogart as an Irish stable
hand, and the wish unfulfilled that the great Geraldine Fitzgerald, in
her screen debut, would take centre stage. The picture is also horribly
dated, playing today like some weird, contrived burlesque of common
sense as a terminally ill patient isn't told of her condition, has to
ask someone what "negative" means, and doesn't inform her husband that
she has about three hours to live. It's not to say that there isn't
material of interest here, just that the material of interest doesn't
live organically with the narrative. Thus there exists on the one hand
the possibility of appreciating the picture in an aloof way, and, on
the other, a situation where respect and conventional enjoyment veers
into something as ugly as camp appreciation.

You can, for instance, read Dark Victory as
the evolution of brittle, shallow socialite Judith Traherne (Davis)
into a fully-actualized human being in three broad steps (note Judith's
tri-paned vanity mirror and, of course, the early subjective glimpse at
equestrian gates through a three-chambered kaleidoscope), each
progression bookmarked by a would-be beau of a distinct class. First
and earthiest is Bogie's stable master; next comes drunken high-society
lush Alec Hamm (Ronald Reagan); and lastly she meets virtuous and
stalwart Dr. Steele (George Brent), drawing a Darwin chart from good
man/poor man to rich man/drunk man to (ostensibly) dashing,
self-sacrificing intellectual of no specific social status in the
process. Steele is so good that as we're introduced to him (by Henry
"Clarence the Angel" Travers, no less), he's mulling a career in
research following years of heartbreak watching patient after patient
fade away from inadequate knowledge and technology. There's also a
minor vein to be mined concerning the sly animalism of the piece--the
equation of the higher classes with animals to be herded, experimented
upon, and put down for being sick.

Most of all, though, Dark Victory is
a prime example of that great Golden Age feminist melodrama in which a
woman is necessarily identified by the man who chooses her, undermined
only slightly by the fact that this masculinized woman picks her mate
instead of the other way around. Points for Judith appearing to try on
every member of a gentleman's club in a fit of pique upon discovering
that Dr. Steele and best pal Ann (Fitzgerald) have conspired to keep
the mortal nature of her condition a secret--points I'm inclined to
take away for Davis (assisted by a prototypically invasive score from
composer Max Steiner) ratcheting up her performance to the rafters in
what begins to feel like an attempt to do with volume what she's
incapable of doing with eloquence. Look at the scene where she realizes
she's relapsed and throws herself into the arms of Ann: it's not
acting, it's a fit. Blame part of that, perhaps, on what various
sources call an offscreen nervous breakdown caused by Davis's crumbling
marriage to Ham Nelson (a marriage she worked diligently to undermine
with a very public dalliance with Howard Hughes)--or on the
rollercoaster effect of her embarking on a torrid affair with co-star
Brent. There's a lot of energy here, it's just all over the place,
off-putting, unbecoming, and finally exhausting. Of course, Casey
Robinson's appalling screenplay (from a play in which fellow ham
Tallulah Bankhead originated the role of Judith) and a hack editing job
by conveyor belt-editor William Holmes don't do much to bolster the
cause, either.

THE DVDWarner has supplemented the DVD release of Dark
Victory with a feature-length commentary pairing
author/critic James Ursini and the late Paul Clinton, formerly of CNN.COMThe
Petrified Forest as a film that succeeded Dark
Victory rather than one that predated it by three years and,
further, made Bogart a viable headliner, more likely than not leading
Jack Warner to want to cast Bogie in a light romantic role opposite his
mega-star in order to groom him for bigger things. (Like Casablanca,
for instance.) Ursini corrects Clinton, but then says that The
Maltese Falcon came next when, in truth, there's a two-year
gap between those films--and nine Bogart movies in-between. It seems
like nit-picking until one considers that their insight that Warner
played puppet-master with his contract players' careers segues
naturally into a discussion of how this film (and the Private
Lives of Elizabeth of Essex) was a make-good for Davis, whom
Warner unsuccessfully tried to lend out for the Scarlett O'Hara role,
and of how Fitzgerald's big-screen career largely fizzled because she
resisted Warner's "suggestions" to accept substandard roles.

Amid a lot of plot explanation and a few extended
silences now and again (chapters five and ten pass largely without
comment), Ursini opines that Davis was far superior to Joan Crawford.
He's welcome to that opinion, of course, but he and Clinton support
Ursini's contention by saying that Davis took more chances while
Crawford was only ever Crawford--and that Davis risked looking
unattractive while Crawford nurtured a diva image. It's an ironic
position to take, for starters, during a film where Davis's radiance is
constantly admired (and in which she's stricken by one of those
diseases that exhibit no physiological symptoms until the hammer
falls). Irony aside, contrary examples abound, specifically 1947's Possessed,
in which Crawford--a woman in her forties--appears without makeup for
the whole of a ten-minute opening sequence as well as for the remainder
of a framing story, plays a schizoid with fewer histrionics than Davis
resorts to as the bubble-headed Judith, and (looking to Mildred
Pierce as well) infuses her character with depths of subtlety
and personal heartbreak.

Put Davis in Mildred
Pierce or, contrarily, Crawford in this mess, and tell me
again how Davis was the actress and Crawford the personality. Maybe
they're referring to pre-Warners Crawford, or maybe they've mistaken
Crawford for Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest. It's a
pretty common misconception, but one I'd hope would be limited to the
common viewer. In a weird documentary called "1939: Tough Competition
for Dark Victory" (10 mins.), Clinton and Ursini are again front and centre (alongside Rudy Behlmer and NEWSDAY's John Anderson) in trumpeting the wonderfulness of 1939, talking about how much better, and more prescient, Dark Victory is
than anything else from that year (including the "best" Capra film, Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington). An unscrubbed trailer also
accompanies a relatively tic-free video transfer that's only marred now
and again by the flickering indignities of age. Contrast is sharp and
fine detail is excellent (you can count every fibre of Davis's fur coat
in chapter 18), though it seems to come at the expense of too much
grain. The accompanying centre-channel mono audio is vibrant, deftly
modulating Davis's shameless (and trademark) over-acting and Steiner's
shameless and likewise laboured score. Available individually or as
part of Warner's five-disc Bette Davis box set.Originally published: February 21, 2006.